The Dear One
by xXxJazzy B. RealxXx
Summary: Dedicated to my family. "Is duty enough of a reason to live a lie...?" Love can transform us in ways we never could have imagined. It brought them together, but will it tear them apart? Shadow/Amy - /Alternative Universe/


**Disclaimer:** I do not own Shadow the Hedgehog, Amy Rose, Gerald Robotnik, and etc and etc from the Sonic the Hedgehog cast.

**Author's Note:**

This is dedicated to my play sister. Her birthday is coming up and she'll be fifteen at long last. I haven't seen her since...ever. I speak to her over the phone all the time, but apparently she's been keeping tabs on my stories and art, and wished for two story requests, since I won't be there to give her a materialistic present.

If you haven't guessed, this is based on Dear John, as requested by her. I personally felt that Dear John was unsatisfying. Like the C-grade review it got, _"It loses all that believable depiction of love both found and lost when it stops being honest and starts being Hollywood."_ It developed too fast for my tastes, but I can see what my sister sees, which is the character resemblance.

This is designed to go how the movie goes along with parts of the book that the movie left out, so I'll try to accomplish that while adding in a lot of my own extras and twists to where it's not exactly like it [especially with characterization or dialogue]. After all, the movie disappointed me, and the book was...sweet, but kind of boring.

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**_Prologue: Insufferable_**

* * *

_...There's something that I'd like to share with you, in this moment now..._

"...S-Soldier?"

Ash fell like snow from the skies.

"Soldier!"

Gunshots and missiles soared overhead.

_After I...had been, shot―_

"SOLDIER!"

_Would you want to know..._

Bloody fingertips twitched on the ground.

_...What was the very first thing, that entered my mind―_

"God damn it, _Shadow_!"

A cloud of nebulas glowed around his pupil.

_Before I blacked out...?_

"_Damn it_, soldier...!"

_Coins._

The flakes of ash turned into gold pennies raining down on his face. They jingled and pealed like bells clattering against each other, and the spinning flips of gold warmed into a memory as his eyes rolled back into his head...

Memories of a twelve year old blonde girl with hair like cornflower threaded in his mind. The memory was cropped in films of gray, but syruped in honey, like a distant flashback of the past.

_I visualized that I was eight years old again you see, on that tour to the .U.S. Mint..._

She turned with the bounce of her ringlets, and he saw himself, short and stubby, smiling right back up at her as he held tight to her hand.

_I'm here with her, laughing and smiling, like I always had back then..._

He stood next to her, latched onto her pinky, both wearing goggles as they watched a machine hammer out the coinage. A middle-aged, bald man around the height as himself stood behind them, grinning from ear to ear with his gray mustache bristling.

_We're listening to a guide explain how coins are made with my foster father._

The blonde girl hunkered down to his level and shook his shoulder in excitement, pointing him to the direction of the mechanical cookie cutter that was rimming a ribbon of metal.

_How they punched out sheet metal._

The blanking press punched out the blank discs of metal before him.

_How they're rimmed and beveled, how they are then stamped and clean, and how each and every batch of coins are personally examined, just in case any of them slip through with the slightest imperfection..._

Mesmerized by the gold glinting off his eyes, he clutched the blonde girl's pinky tighter, before pressing his cheek on her hand and sighing happily.

_Then something else popped into my head..._

The dream peeled away like scrap paper, and his bloodshot eyes strained open when he felt the weight of his helmet being snatched off his head. He blinked, bearing the pain of the bruise welted on his eyebrow like a thundercloud. The soldier shaking him by the shoulders as he coughed up blood was a silhouette fading in and out of his consciousness. A nothing; a no one.

_I am a coin for the United States Army._

His body was paralyzed from the waist down like a wooden puppet without strings; the blood was caked around his eye and spluttering out of his mouth, drying into his black fur; the nerves in his cheek had been sedated by the pain, for he couldn't feel the slaps hitting his face, while the solider on the other end of those slaps couldn't accept the black hedgehog's fate.

_I was minted in the year 1980. I've been punched from sheet metal._

The image of the blanking press punching out the discs of metal repeated in his mind.

_I've been stamped and cleaned._

He envisioned himself once more, piqued with interest as the planchets carried the coins to the stamping process, before looking up to see the blonde girl's face grinning back down on him; the last epitome of his existence.

_...But now, I have..._

Water framed his vision; his bloody fingers trembled into a fist as the rain kissed his face.

_T-Two small holes in me..._

The rain pooled under him as the blood pooled out of him, creating a red river to stream down the cracks of the stone patio like a creek. Smoke pillared up to the sky like billows. His blue lips and fingertips shuddered as blobs of rain formed on his face, wetting his cheeks until they were numbed like ice.

_I...am no longer in perfect condition._

The raindrops leaked off his eyelash while his dead eyes stayed frozen on the heavens. His nostrils flared for oxygen, heartbeats increasing in anticipation to see that tunnel of light welcome him to the afterlife.

_So there's something else I'd like to share with you...right before everything went black._  
The raindrops leaked off his eyelash while his dead eyes stayed frozen on the clouds, nostrils flaring for oxygen, heartbeats increasing in anticipation to see that tunnel of light.

_Would you like to know, the very last thing..._

The nebulas in his eye began to die.

_...That entered my mind?_

He turned his head, pressing his swollen face against the mud, and saw her.

_...You._

She smiled back with dimpled little cheeks, lying on her side across from him with rivers of pink hair wet with mud, cheek against the bloody battle ground with her hands tucked under her head, while tar and rain blanketed her body and stained her cotton white dress.

_...Just, you._

He saw her twenty-one year old self honeyed in gold like she were lying in a yellow meadow on a sunny morning, just like the last of his memories.

She giggled happily, twirling a curl of hair with her shoulders huddled up to her cheeks.

A tear welled in the corner of his eye at the figment of his memories. He swallowed his heart and choked on it as he lifted his head off the ground by a millimeter, mouth quivering.

_...One smile, will distract me from saving my own life..._

The wind swept his quills and braided hers, swirling the strips of burned clothing and the debris of dead bodies around them as the maggots wormed under his fingers. His body shook like a seizure as the veins in his retina strained the white of his eyes; ready to vomit up his emotions and his racing heart along with them to hear her laugh like a symphony despite the mud slopping down her chin.

_A part of me aches at the thought of you being so close, yet so untouchable, because your story and mine...are different now._

Her eyes squinted up as she grinned all the more for him, and reached her hand out.

_But there was a time, when our stories were the same...six years and two lifetimes ago._

He reached his hand out to hers, the mucus filmed over his eyes now forming into the angry tears that streaked the dirt on his face. Her smile became the dam that was holding her own tears back.

_Like all tales, our story also had a beginning, a middle, and an end._

His cheek convulsed as he clenched his fangs, seething out the string of mucus that leaked from his nose; struggling, straining, fighting to touch her brittle fingertips.

_And although this is the way all stories must be, I still can't quite believe, that ours didn't go on;endless..._

...But the world blacked out on him before he could even brush her imaginary hand.

_...There are memories for both of us._

He could hear his heartbeats in the dark―

_I've learned that memories can have a physical, almost loving presence..._

―Her laughter in that dark; nothing but resonance instead of his or her existence.

_...And in this, you and I are different as well. If yours are to be the stars in the nighttime sky, or the sunset on the beach, then mine are to be the haunted empty spaces in between the life I've led._

And unlike you, I've been burdened by questions that I've asked myself a thousand times ever since I first saw you...

Why did I do it?

_...And would I do it again, if given the chance to undo it all...?_

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**Author's Footnote:**

For those who have seen the movie, you'll remember this similar beginning scene, so for those who haven't seen the film, this prologue is nothing more than an, "introduction" to the "end/middle" of the story, but what it's introducing, is the chance to recap on how all this happened.

Bear with the fast pace and mush as the story continues, if you please. I'll try to make it smooth, since I really want to work on North and South soon. The plan, is to finish at least one of these stories before her birthday, which is August 30th. Don't be shocked if you see me having brief stops in The Dear One to post North and South occasionally, or self-contained one shots to take breaks off the two stories.

It's been hard for me to put energy, emotional energy at that, into any written work lately...which is why I haven't updated. I don't want to bullshit everyone with something half-assed. But, here we go.


End file.
